Moon
Moon is a vintage, lightweight, one-person giant puppet in the form of a luminous crescent moon, created in 1995 in the tradition and spirit of Bread and Puppet–style political and community theater—where large-scale, handmade imagery meets public ritual, storytelling, and collective imagination. Playful, mysterious, and quietly powerful, Moon represents cycles, time, change, and the unseen forces that shape our lives.
Made in the 1990s and later gifted to ArtJoy’s Giant Puppets Save the World, this puppet continues its life as a living performance object—restored, maintained, and brought into contemporary parades, festivals, and community gatherings.
Materials & Construction
Moon is made entirely from recycled and repurposed materials using non-toxic, accessible methods characteristic of Bread and Puppet–inspired community puppetry:
Structure: Lightweight wooden frame mounted to a backpack harness for one-person operation
Form & head: Built using papier-mâché techniques
Body & surface: Sewn from recycled vintage bedsheets and fabric
Finish: Painted with leftover non-toxic latex house paint
This approach keeps the puppet lightweight, expressive, and safe for long performances, while staying true to the radical, low-impact, handmade aesthetic of street theater.
Size & Movement
Moon stands approximately 9 feet tall. Its crescent shape and balanced structure give it an ethereal, floating quality in motion, especially when animated in slow, gliding, dance-like patterns. Though visually monumental, it is designed to be operated by a single puppeteer using the backpack-mounted frame.
Restoration & Continuity
In 2015, after decades of use, Moon’s head fully separated from its support structure, threatening the puppet’s future as a performance piece. Rather than retire it, the puppet was carefully re-engineered and rebuilt, using multiple layers of fiberglass to reinforce the internal structure and restore both its structural integrity and expressive performance capabilities.
This restoration allowed Moon to continue its life not as a static artifact, but as a working, moving, performing being.
History & Living Legacy
Now over thirty years old, Moon is a heritage puppet from a vital era of West Coast giant puppetry. Under the care of Giant Puppets Save the World, it remains part of a living lineage of Bread and Puppet–inspired public art—appearing not just to be seen, but to be encountered, experienced, and remembered.
Moon is not a symbol hung on a wall. It is a ritual presence in motion—a reminder that cycles continue, stories repeat, and even fragile handmade things can be rebuilt and returned to the sky.
